Korean New Year Day - Lunar New Year Day, Seolnal, Yutnori
My family’s seollal* events have been gradually scaled down since my mom started to go to church twenty years ago. Her church argues that religious service to the deceased -a big part of seollal - is superstitious and my relatives didn’t appreciate it much. My mom decided to follow her church rules and eventually our seollal has become more of family-gathering, not a huge holiday gathering with relatives. We still keep the good elements of the tradition that is irrelevant to any religious beliefs and doesn’t have patriarchal poison of the holiday. We have tteokguk, play yutnori and do other fun stuff.
* Seollal(설날), Korean New Year, also known as sullal, seolnal, gujung, gujeong, the first day by the Korean lunar calendar is the most important Korean holiday. Families and relatives get together to celebrate the first day of the year and to wish the best luck. The adults honor the deceased with jesa, semi-religious practice, the children do sebae, traditional saluting practice to show respects to parents, grandparents and elderly relatives, they all eat tteokguk, rice-cake soup, play folk games such as yutnori, gegichagi and visit more relatives and close neighbors.
Not that I don’t miss all relatives getting together, cooking, preparing, eating, playing games, and talking about their lives, but I’ve outgrown. It’s always fun as a kid because you earn pocket money, have lots of delicious food, get together with cousins, get adored by the adults, overhear adults’ life stories, all that without working! But it changed and I kind of like the changes that my family made.
This year’s lunar new year day is Jan. 26, 2009 and it’s been eight years since I celebrated it with my Korean family. What I miss the most is yut-nori, along with time that I spent with family and delicious tteokguk that my mom makes.
Yutnori(윷놀이) is a very simple traditional Korean board game originated from an old folk game at the time of the Three Kingdoms (57BCE - 668 CE). You just need a board, mal-pan, four wooden sticks, yut, and small tokens, mal.
If you don’t have mal-pan, you can easily draw it on a piece of paper or card board. The yut sticks replace dice of most board games. One side of the yut sticks is flat and the other side is round, so the scores are determined by the counts of the sticks of which side is up or down. For example, four-up is mo, and four-down is yut.
The sticks are cast to determine how many steps they can move. Each score has its own name, do(pig), gae(dog), geol(sheep), yut(cow), mo(horse) and dwitddo(backward do), depending on the count of sticks that are up and / or down.
It’s so easy that anyone can learn within 1 minute, yet people with any age can play it together and get engaged. People try to get smart in moving their mal in the best possible route to finish it first, but your calculation is not always suggesting the best way. Sometimes, they come up with their own skills or arts in casting the yut sticks, but most of the times, these are not predictable.
I love throwing the yut sticks high up and hearing the sounds of those getting bumped to one another or falling on the floor one by one. I also love the fact each step has its name so that I can move my mal while chanting, i.e. do gae geol yut mo do gae geol! Of course, I love that people get together, shout for each other and give cheers. So much fun!
Yut-nori has never become a kind of gambling. It’s remained as a family / neighbor game.
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